ERC StG project - MapModern

About
the project

Duration
December 2018 — August 2024

Social Networks of the Past. Mapping Hispanic and Lusophone Literary Modernity, 1898-1959

This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement: 803860).

 

This research applies cutting-edge technology to analyse a neglected aspect of Europeanand non-European social and cultural life of the twentieth century: the impact of Hispanicand Lusophone literary networks and cultural mediators in international modernity between 1898 and 1959.

The project pursues three central goals:

– To retrieve the lost history of Ibero-American mediators in modernist interculturaland multilingual networks and reappraise their role.

– To narrow the knowledge divide in terms of access and production in the Ibero-American field by generating and making freely available, new, and reliable data that addresses the lack of documented cultural heritage.

– To offer an innovative and replicable model that can be applied across periods, languages, and disciplines to analyse cross-border phenomena, under-examined mediators and networks, and overshadowed geographical scales in relation to thewider world.

These goals will be achieved using a twofold methodology:

i) employing an open and collaborative research tool providing a data source for quantitative and qualitative analyses on Ibero-American mediators.

ii) deploying four subprojects on key cultural transformation processes that weren distinctive of modern societies (the institutionalization of Ibero-American cultures, the rise of translated literature in key Ibero-American modernist journals, the positioning of Ibero-American women in the cultural field, and the changing roles of Ibero-American mediators in new forms of mass media).

By combining computational methods, cultural and literary history, translation, sociology, and gender and media studies, an interdisciplinary team of six researchers will fill the gap in modernist studies and significantly contribute, using an empirically tested method, to opening new methodological paths towards a decentred global cultural history.